The Museum of Doubt (20 page)

Mak stood up. He was on the airfield he’d left from. The Gulfstream was gone. It was morning. He could see a city in
the distance. Not far away, Ashbath and Maikurg were playing volleyball with what looked like a brick.

A small figure emerged from a ruined hangar half a mile away and started walking towards Mak. Shaking his arms to drain out the rush of postponed pain through his muscles, Mak jogged to meet the receptor. His mind arranged the slim dark shape as Inanna and joy and love burst through the agony. A few seconds later he stopped and stood still, waiting. It was the boy, Najla’s son.

Where’s Inanna? Mak called as the boy approached.

The boy didn’t say anything. He walked up to Mak and said: Did you see my mother?

What would you like me to say?

That you saw her.

Well, I saw her.

Is that the truth?

Yes, it’s the truth. She asked about you. I said you were fine.

Is she happy there?

Yes. She’s very happy. It’s peaceful there.

Is that the truth?

Yes. It’s peaceful.

And she’s happy?

Mak hesitated. Yes, he said. She’s very happy.

Good, said the boy. I’ll go there tonight.

No, said Mak. She said you were to stay here until it was time for you to go.

Why? If it’s so good there, and my mother’s there, why should I stay here?

Because some things are better for you here.

What? When there’s no work, and we don’t have enough to eat, and we can’t travel anywhere, and between the bombers and
the police and getting called up and the Mafia you don’t know who to be more afraid of?

You’re alive, said Mak. Your heart keeps time, the sun rises and sets, the wind blows, the seasons change, and you can feel it all. If there’s just a piece of bread, you can smell it and taste it. People care. Even if they hate you, it means you matter. Even if they don’t care, you can try to make them. You can shout. You can laugh.

So when you said my mother was happy, you were lying?

Yes, said Mak. That was a lie.

How am I supposed to live now?

I don’t know.

The boy took a letter out of his shirt, gave it to Mak and walked away.

I’m sorry, said Mak.

The boy didn’t look back.

The letter was printed out. It was on Enki-headed paper, pp Enki, no signature.

Sir? said the waiter. We’ll begin serving dinner in a few minutes. Would you like to see a menu?

I blinked and looked out towards the street. The glass had darkened. The lights were on.

What do you say? said Maurice.

I saw it. I saw the beautiful worked-through logic of his psychosis, like a simple maze, and I saw how I was going to step through the maze to the way out and leave the restaurant without upsetting him, and carry off with me to dinner at Lee’s a marvellous story of Mak’s downfall to set against the missed meeting and calls of the lost afternoon.

I get it, I said. They blew you off. There’s no lawsuit, right? The dead aren’t going to sue. The story’s not the case. It’s what you’ve just told me.

No! said Mak, laughing and shaking his head. No no. Not the dead. Me! I’m going to sue.

The walls of the maze telescoped upwards, shutting off the exit. I narrowed my eyes.

What?

I’m going to sue the federal government! For negligence! Is it my fault Inanna won’t love me? Am I responsible for the way I am, for the way I look, for the way I talk?

Right, I said.

Rejected lovers. I’m telling you, Bob, this is the case to end all cases. It’s not just me. This is going to be the greatest class action suit since the universe was formed. And I’m going to be the plaintiff, and the head lawyer, leading that lovers’ army into battle. We will not be fobbed off with money or phoney dismissals. We will demand that the court grant us the love we have been unjustly denied.

Sorry, I said. I got to my feet. My apologies. I understood you wrong. There was me thinking it was the dead who were going to sue.
That would have been a nice article. That would have been provocative. That would have been an excellent feature. Now you’re telling me the government’s going to be sued by disappointed lovers. Maurice, that’s not credible. It won’t play. It’s the wrong format.

Where are you going? said Mak.

Got an appointment.

Wait a second. Listen. If I gave you a real exclusive, would you take it?

Come on, Maurice, we’ve been here all afternoon.

How about if I gave you a chance to visit the afterlife?

Sure, I said. Sure. I’d love to go. Call me tomorrow.

You’d love to go?

Can’t think of anything better.

You’re absolutely sure now?

Absolutely. I’ll see––

Because I don’t have to call you. They’re going to take you. Ashbath and Maikurg. They’re waiting at the door.

He pointed. I looked over at the doorway. There were two guys loitering there with their hands in their pockets, a thin, spotty one with no chin and a stocky character with a bushy beard like Karl Marx. They looked like social workers. They probably were social workers.

OK, I said. Maurice, great to see you.

Goodbye, Bob, said Maurice, shaking my hand. He started to cry. I’m sorry.

Maurice, the main thing is not to worry. You’ll be OK, I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. You can find your way home, can’t you? He nodded.

I said goodbye and made for the door. The social workers moved towards me.

Hi, said the beard. I wonder if I could ask what you were discussing with Mr Mak?

That’s private, I said. Excuse me, I’m in a hurry.

Sir, said the beard, we’re empowered by the city authorities to question anyone who comes in contact with Mr Mak.

I don’t think so, I said.

The two men took out plastic wallets and showed me their IDs. Maikurg, said the beard. Ashbath, said chinless. Sir! Sir! Please don’t attempt to leave! We’re going to have to restrain you, sir. Sir!

He limped to the beach one evening in spring. The limp was from a sporting accident in a dark hall. That morning, when he examined the injury, he’d rinsed the bandage in a dogbowl-sized basin in a guesthouse room, rubbing it with a pale green arrowhead of soap and chafing the folds together against the smell of smoke and old banknotes which’d impregnated the cloth. He’d sat cross legged on the bed, wearing just his vest, looking at the wet cotton strip smoothed out and flat on the bedcover in front of him, and read the brown shape left there by his blood.

Blasphemy, he’d said, and bent his body to lick the wound with his tongue. But his belly airbagged out to prevent him.

The beach was clean, flat, finegrained sand, on a bay stockaded by an even wall of sandy soil where the land dropped ten feet to the backshore. He’d known the tide’d be low before he saw it. He’d laboured so long and hard on the beach he could feel the moon’s hauling on the water of the bay, when he lay awake on beds and floors, when the stormy surface of the blood and water mass inside his body settled and cooled. He’d see the tiny eddies and kinks on the surface of the deep curl like singed hairs and the
knifesharp shadow of a single bird move over it, passing between his blood and the dulling shine of his setting heart, his inner sea stopped. At that time the moon beat a tremendous blow and his blood shivered, the artery walls flattened to a bowl. The moon shook his blood from side to side, heaving it till it rose and fell in steep waves, stroking the inside top of his skull with foam and breaking down through his body. It tipped his blood up until it ran shallow and puckered across his bones, filling fleshscoops with billowing pools, gushing latticed through sinewy channels, in a navel-shape a hundred miles across, a crimson delta lazily shored by skin.

The causeway was there as he’d built it twenty years before, a bridge to nowhere, stretching out three hundred yards into the sea from its anchor, a concrete military obstacle sunk in the sand, once a cube, now a pyramid. The wood, almost white with sap when he’d nailed and lashed it together, was black now or, as he got closer, a dark grey-green, as if the powder left when the ocean dried was not salt, but ash. The first joints he’d made, once he’d rehearsed a few scenes of carpentry, were heavy, earnest and time-consuming. He’d worked over them again and again, dovetails mostly for the right angles, and diagonal support struts, not just hammered in for strength, but modelled for elegance, so they fitted flush with the round vertical posts pounded deep into the sand which carried the weight of the structure and prevented it being blown away in the storms. The planks on the boardwalk were planed smooth and flat and fitted together so snug that if you lay under them on a midsummer’s noon you’d hardly have light enough to read by. He ran his fingertips down one of the posts. He’d still been inspired then, mad to get at what he’d seen out on the bay. All the same, it’d seemed important to make the causeway perfect. He’d gone back to those first few timbers a hundred times, ripped them out and made bonfires
of them and started again, when he could have gone ahead and built the causeway more quickly. After all, he’d known where he was going: he was building a bridge to what he’d seen. Now he wondered if he hadn’t had doubts from the time he hammered in the first post. It’d been easier to linger on the beginning of the causeway, tinkering with it, prising out nails, taking an hour to plane a millimetre-thick curl of wood off the narrow edge of a plank, than to hare on into the sea, sacrificing craftsmanship for speed, not because it was harder working below the high watermark, but because beginnings were always easier. Yeah, looking down towards the surf line, he could see how in the end he’d forced himself to charge seawards, lurching out a dozen yards at a time in forty-eight hour frenzies of labour, lips crimping cold nailheads, left thumb beaten black, slave to the sledgehammer, how in the last stretch he’d given up the nails and lashed it together with ship’s rope, up to his waist, inventing knots and bracing the timbers against each other, against all engineering intuition. He was a fool. The idiot in him had stolen up on the wise man one night and eaten his brains. Only a victim of duty would finish a structure like the causeway. The other one, the smart one, he’d known what he was about, tackling the beginning from every angle, always meaning to go on and finish it, but never doing it, just making the beginning more and more perfect. A beautiful beginning was something you could take with you happy to the grave, it was inexhaustible, it was immortal. Only failures never left before the end.

Once he’d finished it, he astonished himself with his patience. He waited for the exact weather, light and time of day when he’d first caught sight of what he’d seen out on the bay. After two weeks he judged it right. He climbed the steps and walked along the causeway to the end. The bare boards became thinner and looser under his feet as he walked but they were well-fixed
and strong enough. He reached the end and stood at the edge, looking at the sea. Whatever it was he’d seen that he’d wanted to reach with the causeway, it wasn’t there any more, and never had been. He watched the waves, the rocks and the clouds for an hour and walked back to the beach. He brought petrol in a canister and threw it over the causeway and tried to set fire to it, but the petrol sank into the sand and his matches blew out in the wind. It started to rain. He fetched an axe and got ready to swing into one of the middle posts. The rising tide unrolled around his feet. He put the axe down. At first he felt sorry for his labour, then he realised that, now it was built, the causeway had nothing to do with him any more. He slung the axe over his shoulder and walked away.

On the evening of his return he limped towards the ladder, climbed up and set off along it. There was a small girl sitting out on the end, where at lowest tide the causeway ran about ten yards into the water. She was sitting with her feet dangling over the edge, her back to the shore, looking at the horizon. She heard him coming when he was about ten yards away, looked round, stared at him for a couple of seconds, and went back to the horizon.

What happened to your leg? she asked, when he reached the end and was standing next to her, leaning on one of the two shoulder-high posts which marked the causeway’s end.

Sporting accident, he said.

What sport?

Snooker. I was supposed to lose the game. I won. I didn’t mean to.

The girl nodded, not looking at him. Men outside her family were generic, numerous but remote and hard to tell apart, like stars, and you might watch them, but you wouldn’t talk to them, and you wouldn’t expect them to talk back. It wasn’t the limp so
much that’d opened her mouth as the way he’d approached, as if he was on his way somewhere, and the end of the wood and the beginning of the water had confused him.

What are you doing here? he said.

Just sitting and watching, she said.

Seen anything?

Nothing special.

So why are you sitting here?

It’s the pier, she said. It’s good to go out to the end and sit there.

He became angry. It’s not a pier! he said. It’s a causeway. I built it.

She looked at him with her eyes saying she wasn’t such a fool as all that.

It’s a causeway, he said sullenly. I was walking along the beach and I saw something out there in the bay, out at sea, that was – you’re too young to even think you’ve been in love.

The girl shrugged.

You haven’t, he said. But suppose you had. Think about how it might have felt. And think about how it would be if your life and your memories and your imagination weren’t real, if they were cheap substitutes, but you didn’t realise it, and thought everything was fine, until one day you were walking along the beach and you saw something out there that reminded you of your real life, the one you didn’t know you’d had.

I think I know what you mean, said the girl.

You’d have to have it, wouldn’t you? So I built the causeway to try to reach it, even though I didn’t know what it was, even though the closer I got to where I thought I’d seen it, the clearer it became that it’d never been there. By the time I got to the end I hated the causeway because, even though it turned out the false life was my real one, it wasn’t worth as much as it’d been
before I’d started building. I should have made more of an effort to burn it. It would have burned nicely. I’m sorry.

You may not have got what you were looking for but you left a good pier behind.

I don’t care, he said. I don’t like it. I shouldn’t have come back. He turned and limped off towards the shore.

The girl turned her head and watched him go. I like it, she said, not sure whether he could hear her or not. She saw him raise his left arm and wave his hand in the air with a contemptuous downward sweep. She laughed, turned back to the sea, sat on her hands and swung her legs.

I like it, she said to the wind. It’s a good pier.